What Makes This Book So Great (8 page)

This is a book about ordinary people getting by and coping with their everyday problems in a world that’s both weirdly different and weirdly similar to our own. It’s a very political book in the sense people normally mean. It’s showing us a world after a proletarian revolution in the US, for goodness’ sake. And yet it certainly isn’t a fantasy of political agency. None of the characters in the novel have any political agency at all. They’re all helpless against the system, and getting by as best they can in the cracks.

Zhang is an ordinary working-class working guy getting by without thinking about things too much. He’s an engineering tech who, during the course of the book, becomes an engineer. He uses futuristic cyberpunk equipment to do his job, but he takes it all for granted. He jacks in to his tools with a sigh. There is no glamour, even when he’s using computer systems to design houses organically. He’s also gay, in a much more unromantic and realistic way than I’m used to seeing with gay characters written by women. He has casual sex. He has a terrible time when he’s forced to live on Baffin Island where there’s no possibility of meeting anyone. He’s forced into an embarrassing situation taking the daughter of his boss on a date.

We also have the points of view of Martine, a twenty-year veteran who’s now lonely among her goats on Mars; Angel, who races a kite (a huge powered hang glider) through the skies of New York City; Alexi, another Martian settler, who wants to get better at engineering; and San Xiang, an ugly girl who gets a new face and finds out it isn’t really what she wanted.

It’s surprising how unusual it is to have a book where the characters really work. Maybe I’ve just read too many quest novels and too many stories about interstellar traders. But it seems that in most fiction while characters may have a job, the story takes them away from it. We don’t see much in the way of actual work being done. Zhang’s work is futuristic and half-cyberpunk, but he has to do it, and keep doing it. The economic relationship between work and living is more realistic in this novel than in any other SF future I can think of. In the end, you’re left with a mosaic picture of a man in his world. Zhang’s world has clearly descended from our world. It’s better in some ways and worse in some ways. If not a plausible future, it’s not a future that has dated itself out of existence in the fifteen years since the book was written. If not a hopeful vision, it’s not a disastrous one either. It has texture and ambiguity. I value that, and I’d like to see more of it.

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

19.
Anathem:
What does it gain from not being our world?

Tom Shippey, who isn’t an idiot, called Neal Stephenson’s
Anathem
(2008) “high fantasy” in
The Times
. So in my second reading of
Anathem
in the two months since it came out, I was trying to figure out what he meant when he used that term about a book that includes spaceships and the scientific method.

Shippey defines high fantasy as “a story set entirely in a secondary world, the creation of which is a major part of the author’s appeal and intention.” Certainly, the world of
Anathem
is deeply appealing. It’s not just that geeks live in giant clock-monasteries, cool as that is. It’s not the way different parts of those monasteries are enclosed for different amounts of time. It’s the angle on time that encourages. Our narrator, Erasmas, is only nineteen, yet it’s second nature to him to say: “When there’s an economy extramuros, we can sell the honey outside the Day Gate and use the money to buy things it’s difficult to make in the concent. When conditions are post-apocalyptic, we can eat it.” Or “For three thousand years it had been the concent’s policy to accept any or all folding chairs and collapsible tables made available to it, and never throw any away.… We had folding chairs made of aluminum, bamboo, aerospace composites, injection-molded poly, salvaged rebar, handcarved wood, bent twigs, advanced newmatter, tree stumps, lashed sticks, brazed scrap metal and plaited grass.” This is a large part of why I love it, and why I missed it after I finished it and wanted to read it again soon. However, this isn’t a fantasy thing. SF has worlds with funny words and customs and interestingly anthropological ways of looking at things.

Shippey also says that Stephenson intended the book to proselytise for the ideas, for potential fraas and suurs, which, if it were the case, would hardly have led him to end it the way he does.

I started thinking about why Stephenson had chosen to set the story in a different world, rather than set it four thousand years or so in our own future. There’s a good plot reason, of course, which is having people from our world show up later. But he could just as well have set it four thousand years in the future and had aliens, rather than people from our world and other cosmoses. Since the first time I read
Anathem
I’ve been assured by people I trust who know about science (Marissa Lingen and Chad Orzel) that essentially the many-worlds alternate physics stuff is all wrong. While the French is cute and all that, it could have been aliens and been fine. The bit I like least about
Anathem
is the bit in space, the probabilistic Millenarian ex Machina stuff. So he could have lost that and not annoyed Mris and other physics people and still kept everything I adore about the book. My general feeling is that SF is better if it’s connected to our world. I have an emotional preference for futures we could get to from here.

Nevertheless, I think it’s better for
Anathem
to be in its own world. There’s a way of writing fantasy where you use history but put it into a subcreated world so that you can talk about the essence of the history and not the details. Guy Gavriel Kay does this a lot, and I have done it myself.

Anathem
is doing that same thing only with the history of science and natural philosophy.

That rocks.

NOVEMBER 30, 2008

20.
A happy ending depends on when you stop:
Heavy Time, Hellburner
and C. J. Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe

Cherryh has been writing the Union-Alliance books since
Downbelow Station
in 1981. They’re a series of standalone novels within a shared universe. The major characters from one book may be seen briefly in another book, but you don’t generally need to have read any specific book to understand any other book in the series. Cherryh delights in turning the reader’s brain inside out anyway, so there are books from all kinds of points of view, and one book may make you sympathise with characters and positions that other books made you detest. I regard this as a major achievement and part of what makes Cherryh a great writer.

In internal chronological order, the series begins with the duo
Heavy Time
(1991) and
Hellburner
(1993) (published in one volume as
Devil to the Belt,
2000), and that’s where I’m beginning my re-read. I’m not sure I’d recommend this as a place to start, not because you need series knowledge to follow them (you definitely don’t) but because
Heavy Time
is so relentlessly grim. Cherryh is seldom a barrel of laughs, but
Heavy Time
is grim even for her. Most of her books are a lot more fun than this. Yet if you did read them first, they might not seem so grim, because a lot of what makes them grim is the inevitability of what’s coming, which you know only from the other books. After all, there’s a definition of tragedy as a story where you know the end.

Unlike most Union-Alliance books, these are a pair, concerning the same characters, and should be read in order. Also unlike the others, they are set in the solar system. We don’t see much of Earth, but this is as close to it as we ever get in these books.

The asteroid belt crawls with miners all hoping for a big strike that’s going to make them rich, but the Company grinds them down worse each year. In
Heavy Time
a couple of prospectors pick up a ship that’s sending a distress signal and complications ensue. Ben and Bird just want to get a bit ahead and Dekker just wants to fly, the Company just want to screw everyone over, and the Fleet just want recruits with the kind of reflexes you can get from being an asteroid miner. In
Hellburner
our protagonists (those who survived
Heavy Time
) are in the Fleet and hoping to get along, until they get involved with trials of a prototype rider-ship.

If Cherryh were a weaker writer, if she didn’t make the characters and the places of her novels so real, it wouldn’t matter that these books are intensely claustrophobic, and that Dekker is on the edge of crazy for most of the time you spend in his head.

These are great feminist novels. There are women in them who succeed on their own merits and yet are questioned because they are women. They’re not in a magically non-sexist future. They’re accused of making it by “whoring around on Helldeck,” to which one of them replies, “You a virgin, Mitch? Didn’t think so.”

It’s also a terrific future. All the details hang together. Asteroid miners being screwed by the Company is somehow more realistic than the scenarios of asteroid miners SF usually offers. And in the background negotiations going on in
Hellburner
you can see the beginnings, if you know what’s coming, of the long betrayals that are up ahead. Cherryh’s future history really has the texture and grain of history, and the books feel to me very much like historical novels. Yet on a series re-read when you know what’s coming, they also have history’s inevitability.

Both of these books have ends that approximate happy endings, and if you were to read them without knowing any more about the universe, they could be read as happy endings. At the end of
Heavy Time,
being drafted comes as a relief, an escape from problems in the Belt. At the end of
Hellburner,
the immediate problems have been solved and it looks as if everything is going to be all right.

These are happy endings to compare with the Albert Finney film version of Churchill’s
The Gathering Storm,
in which the happy ending is that World War II starts. I think you’re assumed to know about the implicit happy ending of WWII. But it’s still a long way off from September of 1939. It’s even worse here, where the end of the War is a quarter of a century away, and even then it isn’t good for the Fleet. Still, Cherryh artfully stops the books at points where we can feel reasonably positive, if we lack foreknowledge, and that’s really very clever of her.

DECEMBER 1, 2008

21.
Knights Who Say “Fuck”: Swearing in Genre Fiction

A little while ago the Mighty God King posted a marvellous collection of doctored book covers, with the titles he felt the books he’d loved as a teenager should have had. The genius of this was the way he used the exact right fonts every time, so that Mercedes Lackey’s
My Little Pony Goes to War
had just the font you were expecting to see on that cover. One of them that made me laugh out loud was his cover for George R. R. Martin’s
A Game of Thrones
. (I love those books.) His new title was
Knights Who Say “Fuck,”
which amused me not only because of the clever Python reference but also because it’s true, they do, and that’s one of the things that makes it different from traditional high fantasy. He’s not the only person whose knights are saying “fuck” these days—Sarah Monette’s charmingly foul-mouthed Mildmay leaps to mind—but it is something you never used to see. It didn’t fit the register of fantasy. The register has broadened. Interesting.

I’m reading Cherryh’s
Downbelow Station,
which was published in 1981. I started it immediately after finishing
Hellburner,
which is set earlier but was published in 1992. I noticed immediately that in
Downbelow Station
the troopers “breathe an obscenity into com,” “swore quietly,” “swore at length,” “adding an obscenity.” In
Hellburner
in equivalent situations they’re saying “Shit, shit, shit!” and “Fuck!”

Now I read both of these books pretty much when they came out, and I didn’t notice anything odd about the level of permitted swearing in them. Yet something definitely changed between 1981 and 1992, and it wasn’t C. J. Cherryh. The number of times someone breathes an oath, an obscenity, or swears viciously in
Downbelow Station,
you can tell she knows the words the troopers are saying. In fact it reminds me of the coy dashes you get in Trollope, where the fact that a husband called a wife a “
____
” in
He Knew He Was Right
is plot-rocking, and no, you never find out what the word is. (The footnotes think “harlot.” As I’m not even faintly shocked by “harlot” I’ve decided to fill in that blank, and all Trollope’s blanks, with the worst words I know.)

So, was Cherryh being effectively censored by what you were allowed to say?

The thing that surprises me about that is the date. I thought it was the sixties when people in books were allowed to use actual oaths, rather than just mighty ones. Did genre fiction lag behind? Certainly it was the New Wave that started talking about sex, but how careful were the words? I noticed when reading W. E. B. Griffin that you can say “shit” all you like in his books as long as you’re not talking about “human excrement” and similarly “fuck” is fine unless you’re talking about “sexual intercourse.” Obscenities are different from description, and use of the words can vary in either direction. These words are charged, and they have very specific registers, they’re significant markers.

You used to see fake “futuristic” swearing. (Who can forget Larry Niven’s “tanj”?) When did that stop?
Drinking Sapphire Wine
has it, and that’s 1976.

So, things clearly changed in the eighties. Why? Was there a specific change, a specific book or date that it changed, within genre fiction? Or was it a general cultural change of what was acceptable slowly bleeding through into genre? Did it get to SF first and seep into fantasy later?
A Game of Thrones
is 1996.